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From Ars technica:Could IP addresses soon be considered “personal information” in Europe? The question was discussed yesterday at a hearing before the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee, where European data protection authorities and privacy advocates backed the idea. Google, not surprisingly, wasn’t as thrilled.

Giving legal protection to IP addresses poses a host of problems for companies like Google that log massive amounts of data and want to know which machines it comes from. IP address tracking can help the company crackdown on click fraud, for instance, and it can help Google identify the general geographical location of many of its visitors.